Reading until the light lets out

Back in grad school I used to cat-sit for my friend and mentor, the novelist Patricia Henley. She and her then-husband lived in an old redbrick schoolhouse way out in the Indiana countryside.

I’d usually stay the weekend, sometimes longer. They had big bookshelves filled with fascinating titles and authors I didn’t know. I’d sometimes take down three or four books at a time and sit in the sunroom with a hot green tea, happily reading until it got too dark to keep going.

This was before the internet and constant distraction, and long before I became a dad. These days, twenty-five years later, I can hardly fathom what such a luxurious stretch of free-time might feel like. The thought of a day spent reading—hell, an hour spent reading—makes me want to weep. There’s only the to-do list now: dishes, laundry, my teaching work, my several side-hustles, urgent emails to send out, the chaos of this current cultural moment to keep up with (and rage against, swallow, mourn). And no list of middle-aged responsibilities would be complete if it didn’t also include the nagging suspicion that I haven’t done enough. That my standards have slipped. That I’m not getting any younger. That I should have chosen differently.

A thought that keeps me sane is that I was lonely and full of doubts back in the day, too. Not a bad kind of lonely—just a hunger for some kind of indescribable something. A sense that everything was beautiful and tragic in equal proportions, including me and my life, and in the end we’d all be ok even if we weren’t. If you’ve ever read in a room until the light ran out of it, you’ll know what I mean. There’s a moment (just after you’ve closed whatever book you’ve been reading and before you’ve gotten up to move) when you take a breath and the world swims with stillness and possibility, and you are as mindlessly free as the breeze-blown pasture grasses, as cricket-song spilling out of the far trees. In a moment like that no one ever really dies. No one goes it alone. All is forgiven in advance.

Sometimes I’d write poems at the old redbrick schoolhouse, things I never sought to publish but wrote because I wanted to and could, snapshots of a solitude I knew would eventually change because that’s what everything eventually does.

Like this one:

Loneliness in Late Spring

The road away from this house
leads north to winter. 

Out back, a horse leans into a wire fence. 
How small the apple in my palm 

against the sky the horse bows its head under.
It’s snowing on the farthest fields.

I am lonely as a bearded oat
for the smell of a horse.

The horse’s wind-crazed mane is a storm 
I navigate & get lost in.

I’ve been thinking about this poem because it’s spring again and still cold here in Massachusetts. And also because, like many of you, I am worried sick about what’s to become of us all in an era of incredible dehumanization and hate. The bad that’s out there right now is big and scary and suffocating. But horses are still good. Some kinds of loneliness, too. Memories of reading all day until the light lets out. The nearness of those things, friends, even if only in words, is a balm.